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From:
Category: Category 1
Date: 11 Apr 2002
Time: 17:33:47
Remote Name: 216.0.47.235
Dear Fellow Member,
You are one in a million, at least several hundred thousand! Of course it is a put up deal. If we had a garden club run by members and our executive branch carefully worked it out so that they would have full control of the copyrights, finances and 'tasking', we would sue. I don't recommend that in our case. We could but it is our mess, let's clean it up. I am not against any single member in WS today, but the linkage to group conscience must be restored. I wrote a little article defining all the important things that a home group does. I came across some really new bits of thinking. What if our home groups are pressure cookers that remold us from the cellular level up? That's just what they are!
Have a great day and thanks for thinking!
Bo S.
When someone asks for help, it forces me to access a special part of myself. I want to report some things that came up in my thinking since I last posted in a series on our Quest Forum about the home group. By way of explanation, I was a biology major at Georgia State College. Although my disease cut my education short, Dr. Jordan taught me a lot. Some members may not be interested in going at these subjects at this level, so my apologies to those.
Each of us reacts to our environment moment by moment. There is a surface to the interactions and there is what happens in each individual body. As recovery addicts, we have become fairly good friends with a few words like seretonin and endorphines. Every body knows about adrenaline. Most people know if you breathe deeply and rapidly, it gives you extra energy. Many people force themselves to breathe slowly and deeply to calm themselves down. There are some things that happen when we are sad for a short time. Other things take place when a person is sad for a long time - or never happy. Certain sports and job related activities produce a thrill. Human beings are set up to react to a variety of things biochemically.
When we walk through the doors and are greeted properly, we feel a rush from the fact that we are appreciated. Getting the hug, sitting among people who understand and accept us and focusing our minds on the recovery talk we hear, all this affects not only our external mood and state, it affects how we are inside as well. Where we may not have experienced certain feelings for a while, it wakes us up to those feelings. Sometimes the emotions spill over into tears. The people who set up the meeting and do the readings or lead the discussion have feeling too. It finally dawned on me when I was reading something about endorphines giving us a rush just for doing a good days work or participating in a hug that this is a big part of what we get from the meetings! We are in the bio-chemical business and supply good feelings along with endorphines to our members! This is not addiction but its opposite. It is really getting what we need for things that are real and happening. The members who do the meeting get special good feelings and bio-chems. A regular supply of these endorphines over a period of time has the power, I believe, to fill in the blanks and heal the damaged parts of our lives. Sometimes, people speak of addiction fracturing their lives. This is not a bad model. The focus of ordinary consciousness on our surroundings and our interactions is diverted by powerful stimulants and depressants. Our moment by moment actions no longer key into our long term goals and our values become skewed. Eventually, as our disease progresses, we begin to step out of the moral boundaries that have been set for us by our families and communities and then we begin to break even those special rules of conduct and behavoir we set for ourselves. This is where the self-destructiveness comes from - we begin to punish ourselves for our bad behavior. It is hard to fight yourself and win in any significant sense. A person like a house cannot stand being divided against itself. The new situations and feelings we experience in meetings reprocess the waste of our pasts into useful information we can use to help others. Our feelings about ourselves changes as we grow through the 12 Steps. We are rebuilt from our bone marrow up through our flesh and skin until we are new persons, reconstructed into the shapes and forms that are real and important for us to be.
I have often described some of NA as what happens when we are sitting in a room and hear a crash. Rushing outside, there is a Volkswagon flipped and kids inside with gasoline spilling an a few flames. You and I rare up and flip the car enough to get the door open and the kids out. Later someone wants to know how we did that because the car is still to heavy for us to lift ordinarily. We look up in amazement and realize it is true. Somehow we had done the impossible. Well, I believe the recovery process allows us to do just that - when we are Twelve Stepping a new comer or writing an article like this one. We are able to step beyond our normal boundaries and do thing not ordinarily possible for us.
Of course a home group is important but not for voting, the home group is what gives us the sense of peace and responsibility we get from being a part of NA. The Home Group is our mountain top. It is where real recovery takes place, where we carry our message in a group setting. Where we really get to know people and let them know us. Whatever damage we suffered from the past, we are supplied with the raw material to rebuild our broken lives into the best possible future for us personally. The ‘say' that comes from voting comes in other forms. When I witnessed the demolition derby politics invading our service structure in the eighties and ninties, I was quite awake. I wondered how God would cover all this. I realized that while certain people can imagine themselves powerful that God really is in charge. If members are displeased with NA, they can simply walk away and a lot of them have. The enhancement and enobelment that comes from personal responsibility makes such a big difference in a person, there is just no end to the changes set in motion. That is why NA changes lives. When good members see that tampered with by unfortunate souls who haven't a clue what they are doing, it can dismay them and force them to back up on their commitment to NA. When we wrote the lines, "we want our rooms to be a safe place of addicts seeking recovery", we weren't kidding. Unfortunately or not, this is not a movie and when we screw up and forget our primary purpose, addicts die. I think we are progressing as a Fellowship and while I have no way of knowing when the new goods times will begin, they seem to be near and I definitely want to be in on them! The relative toughness and indestructability of the home group is what give NA its resiliance and ability to keep coming back. It is hard to kill kudzu because its vines come from kudzu potatoes that are underground and can always send out more shoots to get the food that comes from light striking the green leaf.
In Very Loving Service,
Bo S.